the sounds fall silent, the air stills. Gradually, the fog rolls back and the mists lift. The veins of the leaves glimmer silver in the moonlight.
You notice you feel lighter too. You begin to realize that each of your senses is sharper. You see the imprint of the shadows as they flit away; you sniff the ebbing scent of bonfire smoke, burning peat and kindling; you hear the call of a bird in the distance and you know, without knowing how, that it’s a raven. The beat of its wings disturbs the air as it takes flight. You reach out to touch the nearest tree and realize that your fingertips are tracing the grooves of the bark before they’ve even been pressed to the trunk. You taste the dew on your tongue, though you’ve not opened your mouth: wet earth and salt.
You feel clear. You find that you know answers to questions you’ve been wondering about for weeks, solutions to problems that have been plaguing you for months. You feel calm. Well-stoked anxieties crumble and dissolve to dust. You feel content. Violent wounds soften and fade, leaving no scars inside or out. You stand and breathe the moonlit air, slowly and steadily, until you no longer know what is breath and what is air. Until you no longer feel where you end and the forest begins.
Goldie
I always had vivid dreams and always remembered them when I woke. Sometimes they told me things, things that were going to happen. Sometimes I went somewhere special. That night, the first time, I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d pressed my head under the pillow, trying not to hear Ma and my stepfather in the other room arguing. They argued about silly things. Usually money. Ma would say he should earn more so we could get out of this flat; he would say she should stop nagging and, if she cared so much about moving, ought to get a job herself. She’d say she couldn’t, because of her panic attacks. They fought about babies. She wanted one; he didn’t. Sometimes the fights ended in silence, sometimes in sex. I preferred the silence.
Before it happened, I peered out from under my pillow up at the clock, the luminous hands of the White Rabbit ticking across the numbers. It was very late, or very early—nearly half past three. I worried about falling asleep at my desk in school the next day, since Miss Drummond hated me to do that. She’d tell me I was “wasting my potential.” I told her I was only seven. She told me I “ought to have higher aspirations.” I’d distract her by asking for definitions of her favourite words, like “onomatopoeia.” That always worked. Miss Drummond loved the sound of her own voice; you needed only to ask her to explain or enunciate something and you were free and clear.
Anyway, that was the last I remember of being in bed or, rather, on the sofa where I slept. Then I was in a place full of trees and rocks and everything was muted white, a bit like Christmas but with leaves falling instead of snow. It was dark, except the moon was bright enough for me to see where I was walking, and, strangely, though I’d never been to this place before, I knew where I was going. To meet my sisters. Which was stranger, since I didn’t have any sisters. My stepfather was winning that fight.
I walked a path of stones scattered with white leaves, still falling all around me. I clambered over slippery rocks and fallen trees, their trunks wider than I was tall. Sometimes clouds covered the moon and the air was mist and I couldn’t see so well. I hurt my knee and cut my hand, but I didn’t care. I felt the urge to fly, since I could often fly in my dreams.
For a while the path disappeared, leaving no signs of the direction to take, but I wasn’t scared and didn’t have any doubt about which way to go. I knew whether to cross a stream; I knew to take a left path or a right without thinking. It felt nice, to know. In my non-dream life, I wasn’t like this. I usually felt lost, considering choices for hours, and even then, after finally deciding on something, I still wondered about it, worrying that I’d made the wrong choice. Here I didn’t think, I simply followed wherever I took myself. Also, it was a relief